Scots are solving the problem piece by piece with additional powers regularly being given to their parliament. By James Naughtie Today programme Spending a little time in recent weeks trying to get the pulse of Scotland is a tricky business. You can unsubscribe at any time. Even if a Scot is elected British prime minister, he would only have gotten there with the support of the English, and that support is not doled out to true socialists.Perhaps it is not all doom and gloom.
The level of independence of the Scottish kingdom was fought over by the Scottish kings and by the Norman and Angevin rulers of England who petitioned the Pope and other foreign rulers. Presently, Scotland is equally divided between those for, against, and undecided. I expected a strong dose of anglo-phobia and was even worried about whipping out my English accent in pubs.Instead, I discovered a nation of Scandinavian social democrats determined to live in an oil rich, big state utopia like Norway. Parliamentary seats have been deliberately created to overrepresent Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but England has 532 out of 650 seats.Of these 532 seats, the Conservative Party held 317 at the 2015 election, and in June this will rise markedly. It is a contingent majority at best – it cannot be relied upon, and must not be taken for granted by the SNP. What is not known is how they will vote. The date is September 18, 2014. And now that Boris Johnson is prime minister, a man as Even for those who don’t consider themselves politically minded, the years since the 2014 vote have been a rude awakening. If Bridge of Don voters were trying to say they’ve “had enough” of the SNP, they sure went about it in a strange way. A boy waves the Scottish flag in Trafalgar Square. But Brexit has done the heavy lifting for a second shot at independence, and Johnson is undoubtedly a boon for the cause. Within a few decades, the Scottish government will run almost everything in the country aside from diplomacy, defense and the pound.But Scotland still cannot enjoy the freedoms it wants as long as the U.K. government is so huge and omnipresent. Westminster must become much more like Washington: A body that reserves itself to deal with only those things states cannot do on their own. They envied “nanny states” like Sweden and Denmark and dreamt of a day they could follow them.So, you ask yourself, “Why not just vote to be like Scandinavia?” After all, Scotland is doing pretty well and has a fair portion of the same oil fields that make Norway rich.The problem is as simple as it is intractable: The English.Nearly 90 percent of the U.K. population is English, and England is one of the most conservative countries in the world. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Scotland emerged as an independent polity during the Early Middle Ages, with some historians dating its foundation from the reign of Kenneth MacAlpin in 843. The English are convinced that the reason the Scottish want independence is an abiding, unnecessary and frankly hurtful hatred of them. The new poll comes after a Panelbase survey earlier this month revealed half of Scots support independence. The problem is they do not cover the whole of England, and there are no plans for this to happen at present.However, something needs to give otherwise the Scots will be forced to choose between accepting a political system that leaves them disenfranchised and leaving the U.K. altogether. There is a basic inequality in the U.K. that comes from merging four countries that have wildly unequal populations. A couple of things are obvious, but they leave you uncertain about which way people may turn.
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